![]() ![]() ![]() Revising Southerne as he revised Behn, the play's later adapters experienced its double plot – one strand dealing with the tragic fates of its newly miscegenous African lovers, the other with Charlot's comic maneuvers aimed at finding rich husbands for herself and her sister Lucy in Surinam – as a structural defect. The play is equally taken up with the sexual disguise of its white comic heroine Charlot Welldon, who masquerades as a man for most of the action. In turning to Southerne's play as the primal scene of this abduction from representation, I hope to emphasize Oroonoko's cultural vitality after Behn as a site for the deconstruction and reformation of women's racial and sexual identities.įor all its audacity – an audacity largely unremarked by his contemporaries – the black Imoinda's disappearance into whiteness is not the only way in which Southerne re-visions women in his Oroonoko. The adventures of the black lady - The court of the King of Bantam - The unfortunate happy lady - The fair jilt - Oroonoko or, The royal slave - Agnes de Castro - The history of the nun or, The fair vow-breaker - The nun or, The perjur'd beauty - The lucky mistake - The unfortunate bride. As her racial and sexual identity are reconstructed in whiteness, Behn's black Imoinda becomes an early example of the enforced invisibility of the black female subject in the Americas' dominant cultural discourse. Thomas Southerne's 1696 dramatization of Behn's novella is, in its turn, probably best known for changing the skin color of its Imoinda from black to white. Imoinda, the “beautiful black Venus” of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), is probably the most well-known of the few representations of dark-skinned African women in early modern literature. ![]()
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